Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category

Wishing you all a happy and wonderful Christmas, however and wherever you are celebrating.

For me, Christmas is all about family and traditions and in our family those traditions are invariably Czech. To bring a little bit of Czech Christmas into your lives, I wanted to share these Josef Lada paintings. Lada was a Czech artist who is best known as the illustrator of the The Good Soldier Švejk but it is his scenes of rural life that I love best. We had a book of them that I would pour over for hours as a child and I love them still.

Yesterday was an important anniversary but today is an even more important one for me personally. Fifty years ago today, my mother began her journey to Canada.

It began with a small journey, but my grandmother was distracted and terrified. Her country, which had been so wonderful in her youth, had been occupied for the second time in her life. Instead of Germans, Russians had now rolled into the streets of Prague. Everything she had hoped and planned for her life had come to nothing. But she had two daughters and she wanted better for them – and for herself.

She was a forty-seven-year old widow who had spent a few months taking English lessons, trying to recall a language she’d learned thirty years before and never had need to use. She and her twenty-year old daughter were breaking the law – not just by leaving but by “kidnapping” a minor (my mother). She had the visas for Canada, and a letter for the Czechoslovak border guards about going there to attend her brother’s wedding, and a lot of nerve. With one suitcase a piece (after all, who would flee the country with so few belongings?), they set out.

They were lucky. The border guards were – even months after the Soviet occupation began – miraculously still Czech and no one asked too many questions. They made it through to Austria.

Which is when my mother, who had been stewing silently, reminded my grandmother of the one thing she had forgotten that day.

Her youngest daughter’s 14th birthday.

Eventually, she was forgiven. My mother acknowledged that her birthday probably wasn’t the highest priority of the day – but, mind you, I think this took a while. Possibly years. Young teenage girls aren’t known for their emotional generosity, particularly ones who are already distraught about leaving their beloved homeland.

My grandmother felt guilty all her life for that slip, but she shouldn’t have. She gave my mother a wonderful present that day: a future where she was able to live freely, conquer first school and then the business world based on her own (considerable) merit, travel widely, and dream of a big, bright future. For all three women, it was a journey with a very happy ending.

But it’s been a good reminder to us all never to forget my mother’s birthday.

After months of anticipation, a very great event occurred last Sunday: I became an aunt. Arguably, that was the least of the changes: my brother and sister-in-law became parents, two sets of existing parents became grandparents, and a small and rather wonderful girl came into being.

But as I am unable to comment on any of their mindsets with confidence, let us focus on me.

I am rather adrift as to what it means to be an aunt. Literature provides few useful guides. If I wanted to be a terrifyingly despotic aunt, or a meek spinster aunt, or an emotionally withholding aunt, I am overwhelmed with bookish inspiration. Children’s literature runneth over with aunts you would never want to expose your children to. But what about the kindly aunts?

Eva Ibbotson offers a few: the aunts in Magic Flutes are wonderful, as are the equally supportive aunts in The Dragonfly Pool, but they are a bit timid. Perhaps more suitable inspiration lies with the suffragette aunts in A Song for Summer, who love their niece even if they can’t understand why she would throw away an education to work at an eccentric boarding school. That sounds much more like me.

But Ibbotson also offers up some joyfully awful aunts in A Company of Swans and in some of her children’s books. She was, she admitted, a fan of using aunts in her books and deployed them in all their various facets.

And, of course, P.G. Wodehouse created aunts so terrifying I run from them as quickly as their lily-livered nieces and nephews ever did. There are some nice ones mixed in but who remembers them?

Jane Austen certainly had a flurry of memorable aunts floating around in her books, from the very, very bad (Mrs. Norris in Mansfield Park or Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice) to the very good (Mrs Gardiner, an excellent source of motherly counsel for Elizabeth Bennet) to the undefinable (Miss Bates – doubtlessly a good woman but who doesn’t pity Jane Fairfax for having to deal with her tiresome fussings and rather vocal timidity?).

But that does put me in mind of Fay Weldon’s excellent Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen. If I could be the kind of aunt who dispenses sensible, non-binding advice while discoursing on Jane Austen I think I should be very happy indeed. We may need to wait a few years for that though. Until then, I will be content with cooing over her and buying obscene numbers of children’s books and looking forward to the day we can read them together.

While browsing at my favourite local bookshop this afternoon, a woman came in and started talking with the salesperson. She was looking for a book for her twenty-seven year old son. Her parameters were vague but historical fiction was preferred. Something set in Asia would be nice. And if it involved armies and war, even better.

It was at this point I had to step in.

It’s not that I don’t trust trained sales people to do their jobs. I do, especially at this particular store where the selection seems very carefully curated to consist 90% of books that appeal to me personally. I just happened to be uniquely qualified to make this particular sale.

After all, there was a copy of Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay directly in front of me. It not only matched her particulars, it also happens to be one of my favourite books (confirmed when I reread it last year).

I plucked it from the shelf, passed it to the woman, and told her it was everything she was looking for. The saleswoman had never heard of Kay (though thankfully she stocks his books) and certainly did not have my trump card – the last person I recommended it to was also a twenty-seven year old male and he loved it.

I am delighted to say I made the sale. It is in fact the second time this year I have been able to hand-sell that particular book. Book sellers of Vancouver, beware! I am roaming the streets, ready to pounce on your customers and make passionate recommendations.

I seem to have come through my reading drought and am now happily reaching the end of Whisky Galore by Compton Mackenzie. However, when I was feeling so unsettled with every single other book I tried to read, sometimes I just gave up, closed my eyes, and let someone else read me a story instead. And it was wonderful.

While I have a few favourite podcasts (CBC’s Vinyl Cafe, BBC’s Home Front, and Rachel and Simon’s Tea or Books), I generally stick to audiobooks. I listen to audiobooks regularly and find them a wonderful companion when I’m out walking, when podcasts can go by far too quickly.

Lately though I’ve been exploring the many, many programs available through the BBC Radio website and I’ve had many happy hours of listening as a result. What to? Well, here’s a brief list of some of the intriguing programs currently available (some of which I’ve listened to but most of which are still on my “to listen” list):

Happy Boxing Day everyone! I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and are enjoying a suitably lazy aftermath. We do our celebrating on Christmas Eve, which was lovely, and had a very low key Christmas Day. We ate Christmas cookies for breakfast, went on a beautiful long walk, and then made Indian food for dinner. I finally finished reading Their Finest Hour and a Half by Lissa Evans (nowhere near as good as her recent novel, Crooked Heart) and, with no work until Tuesday, am looking forward to lots more reading between now and then. And maybe, just maybe, even finding the time to write a book review or two.

I am having a bit of a “woe is me” weekend. The stress of this ridiculously unlucky year has been catching up with me over the last month or two and my naturally cheery self is nowhere to be found. This is very poor timing since I should be extra industrious this month, studying hard for my upcoming exam. Except I barely have the mental capacity to write a grocery list, never mind cramming tax rules and investment theories into my overwhelmed little brain, after a full day at work. This is my third exam of the year but by far the largest. I keep telling myself I need to buckle down and work hard for just a few more weeks and then I can relax and take a few months off of studying before starting on the next set of courses. This is very true and very sound advice. I just need to act on it.

Saturday was not an impressive day in the life of Claire. It started well enough but quickly went off the rails. My computer died a quick and entirely unexpected death. If you were ever hoping for a review of the Sylvia Townsend Warner letters I keep mentioning, I apologize. My notes are lost forever. Also, I have now spent 24 hours looking for my Microsoft Office installation CD and it is nowhere to be found. A small thing – at least I have the internet up and working again – but enough to drive me batty in my current mood. My favourite sweater bled in the wash. I forgot to buy key ingredients for dinner but of course didn’t realise until I was halfway through cooking it. My hairdresser worried that I might have a serious health issue because of a recent change she’s noticed in my hair. This of course led to deeply distressing internet searches. For a nice distraction, I thought I’d go see the new James Bond film at my local theatre. I got there 40 minutes ahead of showtime and it was sold out.

Usually, I am up to this level of chaos. I am resilient and cheerful. I am generally considered to be charming and optimistic. I take things in my stride and move forward. Yesterday, I just wanted to hit something. Very hard. Or take up drinking. Instead, I had a hot bath, finished reading A.D. Scott’s A Double Death on the Black Isle (not as good as the first book in the series – or was is that just my cross mood colouring my view of it?) and went to bed early.

Today, I tried to calm myself. I did yard work. I bought flowers for myself. I went for a lovely walk in the woods. I attended a concert of Mozart’s Requiem. But I still feel frazzled and exhausted. And tomorrow, another work week starts.

The Mozart concert today was held at a church and before the music started, there was a reading. It was Ecclesiastes 3 – a passage even heathens like me are familiar with:

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

This last year has been a trying season of my life and in the lives of those around me. I keep telling myself things will get easier after X is done. But we’ve been through five or six X events now and it’s not getting any easier. It’s not getting worse, though. There is that. I am still hopeful that once I get through this exam at the end of the month, I’ll be able to relax properly for the first time since last November. Fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, I keep reading more novels than I should. Definitely more historical novels than I should in my current mood (damn you Mr. Trollope and Ms. Heyer for being so irresistible). There is nothing so alluring to me right now as a heroine who only needs to worry about her family and her romantic life. How simple that sounds! How much easier than having to balance that with full-time work and further career ambitions! If you know of any gentleman of means looking for a sensible, financially-savvy wife to serve as chatelaine of his profitable estate, please send him my way. Immediately.